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A Grand Weekend Out for Pennsylvanians

It was one reception after another, at the Waldorf-Astoria and around town, at the annual New York meeting of the Pennsylvania Society, a December weekend ritual for politicians, lobbyists and business leaders since 1899.Credit
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

It was 1899 when the Pennsylvania Society first gathered for oysters and Delmonico steaks at the Waldorf-Astoria, a gilded era when, the story goes, the industrialists and bankers who owned Pennsylvania lived in New York City.

Fricks and Carnegies no longer attend, but 114 years on, the Pennsylvania Society gathering has expanded to more than 60 receptions and parties over three days, and it is still every bit the semiprivate summit of the powers that be in the Keystone State.

Politicians from the governor down, lobbyists and lawyers seeking their favor, corporate chiefs from Pittsburgh and Philadelphia inclined to write campaign checks — they all descended this weekend on the Waldorf, where the society’s flag flapped above the Park Avenue entrance.

“I wouldn’t know what to do this weekend if I stayed home,” said Edward G. Rendell, a Democratic former governor making his 36th annual visit. “For politicians, it’s like salmon swimming upstream to give birth. We do it by instinct.”

Good-government types back home editorialize over the closed-door wheeling and dealing, not to mention the millions of dollars spent by thousands of Pennsylvanians in Manhattan. Shouldn’t that money oil the economy of Philadelphia, or Reading, or Wilkes-Barre? “It denigrates our state,” fumed a columnist for The Philadelphia Daily News on Friday.

Left unsaid was an ever-so-slight inferiority complex: The Keystone State is grand, but the Empire State, grander. “People come to enjoy the weekend in New York,” said Terry Madonna, a political scientist at Franklin & Marshall College who has been attending for more than 20 years. “They shop. They do plays. They go out and eat at, arguably, the best dining establishments in the world. I go to Barneys.”

Asked that $64,000 question, Senator Patrick J. Toomey, a Republican and a former president of the small-government Club for Growth, grimaced tightly. “It’s the adventure of picking up and going someplace out of state,” he said, standing in the ornate entry hall of the Metropolitan Club on Fifth Avenue, where he spoke Saturday morning to the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association.

Not coincidentally, the Pennsylvania Society weekend is the start of the state’s campaign season, a whirl of fund-raising, alliance-building and gossip-swapping. The rumor pulsing on Friday, cued up in that morning’s Philadelphia Daily News, was that Attorney General Kathleen Kane, a rising Democrat, might challenge Mr. Toomey in 2016.

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Handshakes all around: Dominic Pileggi, majority leader of the Pennsylvania Senate, on Friday night, doing what comes naturally.Credit
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

Ms. Kane laughed off the story as she entered the Vanderbilt Room in the Waldorf on Friday evening, one of eight drop-ins she planned for the night. She joined a line to greet Dominic Pileggi, a Republican and the majority leader of the Pennsylvania State Senate.

Mr. Rendell, a gregarious figure of bipartisan popularity, asked one and all, “Have you ever seen a receiving line at a Pennsylvania Society reception?” He called Mr. Pileggi, who wore a business suit, white shirt and rep tie, the most powerful official in the state because of his ability to advance or block a governor’s agenda. “If you do any business in Pennsylvania, you come to Dominic’s party,” said Mr. Rendell.

The room throbbed with lawmakers, aides and lobbyists from all corners of the commonwealth — the kind of crowd that uses the term “commonwealth.”

“Even if you just buy a train ticket to Penn Station and stand in the Waldorf lobby you’ll meet everyone,” said Brian D. Gralnick, a director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.

His group was holding a dessert reception on Saturday night. There were also receptions paid for by the Marcellus Shale Coalition, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Consol Energy Corporation, which had invited “Captains of Industry,” modern-day versions of those Fricks and Carnegies.

Most were invitation-only, and a reporter who indiscreetly pulled out a notepad was asked to leave more than one, including a fund-raiser for Mr. Toomey at a private residence on East 63rd Street.

At a gathering in the Louis XVI Suite of the Waldorf to honor the Republican leader of the State House, Mike Turzai, a fellow lawmaker in a Santa Claus tie balanced a Scotch and a plate of shrimp in one hand while a lobbyist described a bill he had drafted. “We’ll be sure to bury it,” chuckled the State House member, throwing his shrimp-free arm around the lobbyist’s shoulders.

The political buzz this year was about the free-for-all among Democrats challenging Gov. Tom Corbett’s re-election next year. With only one in five Pennsylvania voters saying the governor deserves to be re-elected, according to an Oct. 31 Franklin & Marshall poll, no fewer than eight Democrats have picked up the scent and jumped into the primary contest.

Democratic operatives whispered about whether the early front-runner, Representative Allyson Y. Schwartz, a Philadelphia congresswoman, was too liberal to win support in the central and western regions. There was chatter about a business-friendly alternative, Rob McCord, the state treasurer, who held a fund-raiser on Saturday at the Harvard Club.

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Politicians, lobbyists and business leaders gathered at the Waldorf-Astoria.Credit
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

And there was also talk of a dark-horse candidate, Tom Wolf, a businessman from York County, who drew attention by donating to Pennsylvania food banks the $15,000 it would have cost to hold a reception.

Republicans, who had been alarmed at Mr. Corbett’s sinking approval ratings, were feeling energized after the governor pushed through a major transportation package late last month with the support of business and organized labor.

At the Metropolitan Club on Saturday morning, he defended his record to a receptive gathering of business executives. In a gilded room inspired by an Italian Renaissance palazzo, painted cherubs on the ceiling watched as Mr. Corbett spoke of the $2.3 billion transportation package as a triumph of his bipartisan leadership.

Mr. McCord, who also spoke, challenged the governor, who even with Republican majorities in the legislature has been stymied on other top priorities like pension reform and privatizing state-owned liquor stores. “In Year 4, batting .200 is not a good sign,” Mr. McCord said.

On Saturday night in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf, the Pennsylvania Society dinner honored a native son of Scranton, Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

“I only heard about this dinner in hushed tones,” said Mr. Biden, whose family moved when he was 10 to Delaware, where he flourished in politics as a United States senator.

He offered a long and colorful account of his family ancestry, beginning with a forebear who moved to Pennsylvania in 1682 and including a great-grandfather who was a mining engineer and a poet, the author of “Lackawanna, Ever Fair.” Mr. Biden read a stanza.

If Pennsylvanians were inclined to feel a little like a sixth borough when contemplating New York City, Mr. Biden offered reassurance that all they need to do to experience a real inferiority complex was move to Delaware. “I raised over 60 percent of my money from y’all during my political career,” he told the 1,600 Pennsylvania movers and shakers.

After he was chosen for the presidential ticket, he said, “Obama convinced Americans I never left Pennsylvania. I’m a kid who climbed out of a coal mine.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 16, 2013, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: A Grand Weekend Out for Pennsylvanians. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe